There's welcome news out of the U.K. this week: the government-established Charity Commission has ruled that the adoption agency Catholic Care must abide by anti-discrimination laws and therefore may not refuse to consider same-sex couples as prospective parents:

The Charity Commission... ruled that discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation is a "serious matter" because it "departs from the principle of treating people equally", and that religious views cannot justify such bias because adoption is a public matter.

..."In certain circumstances, it is not against the law for charities to discriminate on the grounds of sexual orientation. However, because the prohibition on such discrimination is a fundamental principle of human rights law, such discrimination can only be permitted in the most compelling circumstances. We have concluded that in this case the reasons Catholic Care have set out do not justify their wish to discriminate."

Predictably, Catholic Care is now planning to shut down, since as is abundantly clear by now, this church would rather see children go homeless than deliver them into the care of stable, loving families whose lifestyle the Catholic church disapproves of. Eleven other Catholic adoption agencies in England have all closed down already for the same reason, and this is the last one still in operation. If it closes its doors, that will be the end of Catholic-run adoption services in the country - and I say, good riddance.

The closure of Catholic adoption agencies can be likened to the disappearance of an industry because technology has provided a new way to do the same work more cheaply or efficiently. Yes, in the short run, this causes pain and dislocation for people who used to perform a job that's no longer required and are now out of work. But in the long run, it's better for our economy that obsolete industries vanish, because that portion of society's resources can be redirected into more valuable and productive endeavors.

Just so is the disappearance of prejudiced religious charities. In the short run, it may cause pain and hardship for the people those charities were willing to serve. But in the long run, it's better for society that they vanish, because that slack will inevitably be taken up by new groups that cater to everyone, without fear or favor, and don't arbitrarily exclude or refuse to help people who don't fit a narrow set of prejudices. (See this post for an example of how this has worked in Washington, D.C.)

This story is a classic example of why I asked how much good religious charities really do. Catholic Care's refusal to abide by pro-equality laws shows that their main priority isn't helping people in need, but enforcing religious discrimination, partitioning the world into sets of people whom they judge as worthy or unworthy of their aid. A group like this doesn't deserve the support of the public or the state, just as we wouldn't tolerate a charity that refused to serve black people. It's better that they disappear so that they can be replaced by an organization whose only goal is to do good, rather than one that sees doing good as a side effect of promoting their archaic and narrow-minded worldview.

Evolution is a blind tinkerer, lacking the foresight of human engineers. Rarely, if ever, does it discard established designs and start over fresh, even when that would be more efficient. Instead, it builds on and around past adaptations, using the old as a foundation for the new. This is true throughout the biosphere, and it's especially true of one of the most complex structures ever evolved, the human brain. The physical architecture of the mind shows, through and through, the evolutionary hacks and kludges that went into creating it.

In his book The Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan points out that the human brain has a threefold division. The most complex and most recently evolved structure is the neocortex, responsible for rational judgment, self-control, long-term planning, and all those other characteristics we think of as most uniquely human. Below it, somewhat older, is the limbic system: shared by all mammals, producing feelings of parental love and pair-bonding. And oldest and most primitive, shared by all vertebrates, is the brainstem, which controls the instinctive drives and behaviors known as the four "F"'s - fight, flight, feeding, and reproduction.

And if you're feeling allegorical, you might notice a correspondence with the world's religions. No organized religion in existence today posits a god of the neocortex. A few of the best offer a god of the mammalian brain, but even they rarely aspire to anything higher. But most - the belligerent, aggrieved, crudely literal fundamentalist faiths that command the allegiance of hundreds of millions - have gods of the reptile brain. These deities well up from the brainstem, the evolutionary remnant that sees the world as a dark palette of anger, fear, hunger and lust. Like the promptings of the brainstem, they're concerned, more than anything else, with the lowest and most primitive animal drives: what we eat, how and with whom we have sex, whether we observe rituals and taboos relating to purity and contamination. Also like the promptings of the brainstem, the religions they preside over tend to include generous amounts of aggression, submission, and xenophobia, and inflexible rules on when these are to be displayed and toward whom.

Of course, I'm not saying that religion originates solely in the brainstem. Were that the case, we'd see distinctly religious behavior throughout the animal kingdom, which we obviously don't. Religion requires other mental capabilities that are largely unique to humans and other intelligent mammals - social dominance hierarchies, pattern-seeking behavior, and an awareness of personal mortality. Still, it's striking how close is the correspondence between the concerns of fundamentalist religion and the instinctive drives mediated by the most evolutionarily primitive part of our brains.

But from the rational perspective - the highest, most uniquely human perspective - it's clear how ridiculous and morally outrageous this is. The fundamentalists believe in a supreme, universe-transcending creator whose single-minded, all-consuming focus is what people do with their genitals - a clownish, laughable notion deserving only ridicule. But even worse is the notion, held by millions of believers, that this being threatens humans: "Obey me or I'll hurt you!" This idea is a moral depravity that could only be born from wicked minds.

Any god worthy of the name wouldn't coerce its creatures' obedience through fear or pain, but would set up the world so that they would all freely choose through reason to do the right thing. That would be how a supreme intelligence would create; that would be a god of the neocortex. Instead, the religions of this world are stocked with clumsy, brawling, belligerent gods of the reptile brain - gods who are constantly bewildered and enraged when their plans go astray and who can think of no better tools than violence and destruction.

Religion is supposed to bring out the best in us, we're told by its defenders; it's supposed to encourage the decency and compassion that human beings are capable of. And perhaps, sometimes, it does do this. But more often, it gives vent to the violent, destructive side of our nature, gives us license to express our xenophobia and violence and rage under the illusion that these qualities are endorsed by God.

Although I've learned not to expect much from the right-leaning Supreme Court, I've been pleasantly surprised by some of their recent decisions. First was Holy See v. John Doe, in which the court upheld a ruling that the Vatican isn't immune from lawsuits over its protection of pedophiles. The second was Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, in which a Christian student group sued a California law school to demand - what else? - the legal right to discriminate against gays.

The law school has a policy that all official student groups must accept all comers and may not turn anyone away on grounds of race, gender, or sexual orientation. The Christian group claimed that they should be able to exclude gays and still receive all the benefits granted to officially recognized student groups: university funding, the use of university facilities for meetings, and the right to use the university's newsletter for their communications. Fortunately, the Supreme Court disagreed:

The court held that the all-comers condition on access to a limited public forum was both reasonable and viewpoint neutral, and therefore did not violate CLS's right to free speech. Nor, in the court's view, did Hastings impermissibly impair CLS's right to expressive association: Hastings did not order CLS to admit any student, nor did the school proscribe any speech; Hastings merely placed conditions on the use of school facilities and funds.

This decision was both simple and reasonable, and is the obvious consequence of state and federal laws forbidding the government to cooperate in discrimination. Since the activity fee that funds student groups is mandatory, Hastings' policy ensures that no student is "forced to fund a group that would reject her as a member". As the court points out, other groups such as fraternities and sororities don't have official school recognition, yet they continue to thrive, and CLS is also still in existence and still holding its own events.

Departing Justice John Paul Stevens summed up the issue at hand in his concurrence, in a praiseworthy reminder that religiously inspired bigotry is no different than any other kind of bigotry:

Other groups may exclude or mistreat Jews, blacks, and women — or those who do not share their contempt for Jews, blacks, and women. A free society must tolerate such groups. It need not subsidize them, give them its official imprimatur, or grant them equal access to law school facilities.

All well and good, and I look forward to this decision being applied across the country. (Yes, I'm perfectly happy to see it apply to atheist groups as well.) But then I got a news alert directing me to this column, by Mike Adams on the ultra-right-wing site Townhall. As you'd expect, he's furious that the government won't cooperate in spreading his prejudice, and he's threatening to do something about it:

...when I get back to the secular university in August, I plan to round up the students I know who are most hostile to atheism. Then I'm going to get them to help me find atheist-haters willing to join atheist student groups across the South. I plan to use my young fundamentalist Christian warriors to undermine the mission of every group that disagrees with me on the existence of God.

That means an invading group can turn a smaller, weaker group into second class citizens on campus. That's what I intend to do to those groups who do not believe in God.

I do not seek robust debate. I seek power over the godless heathen dissident.

Now obviously, this is just a petulant tantrum. I don't expect Adams to actually attempt this idiotic plan, but even if he tried, it would be easy to thwart him. The court's decision pointed out that student groups could still, for example, expel members who didn't pay dues, or restrict officer positions to those who had been members for a year or more. If his "young Christian warriors" wanted to disrupt an atheist club, they'd have to sit and wait for a year, paying to promote atheism the whole time, before they'd get their chance. I doubt many Christians would be willing to do that. Or an atheist law students' club could just forgo official recognition, exactly as the court emphasized that they could, and restrict their membership to professing nonbelievers.

What concerns me more is that Mike Adams isn't just some random wingnut. According to his biography, he's a criminology professor at UNC-Wilmington.

It's one thing for professors to express political opinions. Liberal or conservative, they have the same free-speech rights as anyone else. It's something else altogether for Adams, a college professor, to proclaim that he seeks "power" over students on his own campus who disagree with him, that he "can't stand" them, that he wants to "undermine" and "destroy" their associations, and that his goal is to reduce them to "second-class citizens". It's chilling and inappropriate in the extreme for any person to make such statements about people over whom he has legitimate authority. If I were an atheist student, after reading this, I wouldn't be confident of fair treatment in Adams' class. (Just imagine the response from the right wing if an atheist professor wrote a column saying that he can't stand Christian students, wants to treat them as second-class citizens, and plans to disrupt and destroy their church meetings.)

I plan to write to UNC-Wilmington to bring this column to their attention and to ask if they sanction these kinds of statements from their professors about their own students. Here's contact info for the dean of Adams' school. Anyone else want to join me in writing a polite letter?

As you've probably heard, last week a 60-foot-high Jesus statue in Ohio, nicknamed "Touchdown Jesus", was completely destroyed in a fire after being struck by lightning. An adjacent amphitheater, part of the same evangelical church, was also burned and suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.

The church has already vowed to rebuild the statue, but it seems to me they're acting far too hastily. Why aren't they considering the possibility that this destruction was an expression of God's wrath at the church, and if they rebuild the statue, they'll just be provoking him further?

In fact, according to the USA Today article, the statue was built with lightning rods, but they failed to protect it from this strike. If I were the kind of person given to thinking this way, I'd consider that to be even stronger evidence that this fire wasn't just a coincidence but an expression of God's will. Shouldn't this church think very carefully about what they might have done wrong before going ahead with the rebuilding? Shouldn't they ask themselves what they might have done to provoke God's anger? And hasn't it even occurred to them that this statue's very existence was a blatant violation of the Second Commandment, which orders believers to make no graven images?

Of course, as an atheist, I don't believe there's any will or intentionality behind natural events - much less that there's some Bronze Age thunder god who expresses his displeasure with humanity by wreaking catastrophes on us, like an abusive father beating his children for disobedience. Such ideas belong to the mythology of ancient eras. But this answer isn't available to most Christian sects, who do believe in a god who uses natural disasters to punish human beings. They've said so themselves, many times, and they don't hesitate to draw moral lessons when some disaster strikes a person or group they disagree with. Why, then, do they fall silent - why do they suddenly revert to the explanation of chance - when a similar disaster is visited upon the faithful?

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, the Christian hate group Repent America issued a gleeful press release celebrating the destruction as God's punishment for Louisiana permitting homosexuality and abortion. Now, in 2010, an enormous wildfire is burning in the state of Arizona, incinerating thousands of acres and threatening the city of Flagstaff. If you adopt the Christian viewpoint that sees hurricanes as a punishment for homosexuality, isn't it equally possible that the wildfires are a punishment for the passage of Arizona's draconian anti-immigration law? After all, the Bible explicitly calls on believers to shelter and care for the alien and the stranger. Yet no press releases have been forthcoming from right-wing Christian groups, and some of them have actually praised the Arizona law. Similarly, though deep-red states like Kansas and Oklahoma are frequently devastated by tornadoes, no Christian group ever seems to think that this might have anything to do with those states' absurdly cruel anti-gay laws.

And it never works the other way, either: no Christianist group ever remarks on the lack of a natural disaster as evidence of God's intent. To name one infamous example, Pat Robertson said in 1998 that the city of Orlando could expect earthquakes, hurricanes and possibly a meteor strike as punishment for participating in a gay-pride event. No such disaster occurred. Robertson (who, you may have noticed, has a shoddy track record as a prophet) also threatened the city of Dover, mafiosi-style, that catastrophe might be coming after the citizens voted out a pro-creationist school board. Again, no destruction followed. Do Christians take any message from this? Do they stop to consider that maybe God doesn't hate gay people and evolutionary scientists as much as Pat Robertson does?

The reality is that natural disasters indiscriminately strike people of all faiths and creeds alike. Militant Christians just pick out the ones that occur to people they disagree with and label them as God's judgment, while they ignore the ones that afflict people they agree with. Not only is this attitude sadistic and cruel, it exhibits the extreme arrogance of those who fantasize that they can speak for God, that they can see a divine plan in the workings of chance and have the right to tell the rest of us what it is. But the only thing that's actually guiding their sight is their own callous imagination. The prophets of disaster tell us much about their own sense of morality, and how they'd like to hurt people they don't agree with; but they have no insight whatsoever into the laws that guide the workings of the universe.

Every time I think we've seen the worst of what the Roman Catholic church and this pope are capable of, they come up with a way to sink lower still. Back in January, when Benedict reinstated a misogynist, Holocaust-denying bishop, I could never have imagined that that would be the least offensive and disgusting thing they'd have done this year - yet it seems like that may very well be the case.

The newest evidence of this comes via this story from the AP. I previously detailed a case where the current pope, back when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, assigned a known child molester to therapy and then washed his hands of the matter; and another case where Ratzinger ignored urgent letters from an archbishop requesting an ecclesiastical trial for a priest known to have molested as many as 200 deaf boys. But this story is the most direct evidence yet of Ratzinger's culpable neglect and stonewalling over cases of child rape.

Back in 1981, the diocese of Oakland wrote to Ratzinger, who was then head of the Vatican's doctrinal watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, urging him to begin proceedings to defrock Rev. Stephen Kiesle, another confessed priestly pedophile. Kiesle had previously pleaded no contest to tying up and molesting two children in a church rectory, and the diocese wrote to Rome asking that he be defrocked (in fact, Kiesle himself requested to be defrocked). Ratzinger ignored multiple letters for four years. Finally, in 1985, he wrote back - but said that the case needed still more time, and that proceedings had to be slow and deliberate in order to safeguard "the good of the universal church" (!)

This court, although it regards the arguments presented in favor of removal in this case to be of grave significance, nevertheless deems it necessary to consider the good of the Universal Church together with that of the petitioner, and it is also unable to make light of the detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ's faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner. (source)

The young age of the petitioner - that is, the pedophile priest! Incredibly, Ratzinger was more concerned about the harm defrocking a child molester would do to the Church's public image than he was about the harm that the molester had already done and might still do to vulnerable children. As multiple commenters have pointed out, the young age of the molester (he was 38 at the time) might well have been a factor also. Ratzinger must be aware of the aging and dwindling priesthood and the paucity of new recruits; it's likely that he wanted to hang on to every ordained man as long as possible, regardless of the price.

Andrew Sullivan, himself a conservative Catholic, calls this outrageous letter "the third strike" for this pope:

It is a document designed to prevent dismissing a priest as young as 38. Perhaps the fast-aging priesthood was a concern and dismissing such a young priest was to be avoided. But it's clear that the age of the priest is of far more importance to Ratzinger than the age of the minors he raped. All the sympathy and concern is with the rapist, not the raped. This is a document about protecting the powerful even when they rape the powerless.

So far, the typical Vatican apologist defense has been to claim that Ratzinger was an ivory-tower type, so concerned with ponderous matters of theology that he couldn't stoop to deal with such mundane trivia as a man in his employ raping and molesting children. But in 2006, when an archbishop openly defied the Vatican's rule on celibacy by ordaining married men as priests, Pope Benedict excommunicated him six days later. Again, this is the same man who took four years even to respond to a letter pleading with him to do something about an active pedophile.

All of this has led to this announcement, by a British human-rights lawyer seeking to have the Pope put on trial for crimes against humanity the next time he visits the U.K. It's a good idea, although I'm not yet convinced that the Pope's culpability rises to the level of the criminal. Despicable as they were, it seems that his sins were of omission rather than commission - failing to do anything about pedophiles preying on children, rather than actively assisting them in doing so - though given the steady trickle of new details, I may have to retract that statement in the near future. And in any case, I'm sure the U.K. government would do everything in its power to preempt any criminal investigation (conservative Catholics are still an influential voting bloc). However, I think a civil lawsuit is a very real possibility and a legal avenue that should be explored.

Lastly, and in case there was any doubt in your mind remaining about the Catholic church's intentions, there's this story from Connecticut. The state legislature has proposed a bill that would lift the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse cases, and the bishops ordered a letter to be read during Mass urging their parishioners to lobby against it. This shows, more clearly than anything else possibly could, that the Catholic church is still concerned first and foremost with protecting itself, rather than seeing that justice is done. If they truly wanted to be sure that no molesters were left in their ranks, they'd welcome this bill - and the fact that they oppose it can only mean that they know of more cases of molestation that haven't yet come to light.

But if I had to pick one quote to sum up the depths of wickedness and hypocrisy displayed by this church, it'd be this one from the columnist Libby Purves, a former Catholic turned deist. She beautifully turns their own words against them by quoting the Penny Catechism she learned as a child:

Numbers 328 and 329 refer, making it clear that we are "answerable for the sins of others" when we share the guilt "by counsel, command, consent, provocation, by concealment, by silence..."

Forget the lordly authoritarianism which speaks of the "good of the Universal Church": that Church itself plainly states that concealing crime by silence is wrong, and that it is worse still to counsel and command others to commit the same sin of silence and concealment. Yet this crime, this sin, was being regularly urged on children, parents and parishioners by men in authority: the solemn clerical authority which purports to draw its privilege direct from the eternal Truth and to see into the depths of the heart. It is an all-male authority, too, in which the greenest young priest outranks an experienced nun or devout mother. It has been the perfect screen for wickedness.

Today, I'm excited to report that I have some breaking news to share with Daylight Atheism readers.

From a highly placed anonymous source inside the Vatican, I've received a letter containing proofs for a new advertising campaign that the Roman Catholic church has been developing for the past several years. The ultimate goal was to run these ads on billboards throughout the world. The bishops in charge described these ads as "the most compelling argument ever made for Holy Mother Church's supreme moral authority and sanctity", and anticipated that they would provoke millions of conversions to Catholicism in the first few days after they went up.

However, due to recent news events and the perceived sensitivity of some of the unfortunate facts thus disclosed, the ad campaign was delayed and ultimately dropped. The concept art and proofs, most of which were already finished, were shelved in a secret Vatican archive. They've never been seen by the world - until now. It's my privilege to be able to show them to you. I think you'll agree with me that they do indeed make a convincing case!

John Hartwig was the principal of a private elementary school run by the conservative Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. Last month, he was fired by a church council. The reasons for his dismissal are murky, but they appear to have something to do with this:

Hartwig's father, a former pastor, authored a document years ago questioning Lutheran doctrine that says women shall not have authority over men. Church members say Hartwig, who has been principal since the summer of 2003, was accused of distributing that document to some members of the congregation.

This interpretation is supported by what happened at the church meeting where Hartwig was fired. Over 300 people attended the meeting, many of them concerned parents who supported Hartwig, to voice their opinions - but not all of them got a chance to do so. By decree of the council president, none of the women who attended the meeting were permitted to vote or even to speak:

Women who wanted to ask questions at the meeting were told to write them on a piece of paper and have a man read them aloud. But some, including Hartwig's own daughter, said their questions were never read.

Doubtless, the church leaders got their inspiration from some of the more viciously sexist passages in the Bible commanding women to be silent and subservient to men. In particular, they were probably thinking of this one:

"Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church."

—1 Corinthians 14:34-35

Ironically, these verses may not have been part of the original text of the New Testament. As Bart Ehrman points out in Misquoting Jesus [p.183], we have several surviving NT manuscripts in which these verses are shuffled around: in some they appear after verse 33, in others they appear after verse 40. This is usually a dead giveaway that the verses in question were originally added as a marginal note by a scribe, then interpolated into the text by later copyists.

But whether they're original or not, it hardly matters. These verses are accepted as part of the canon, believed to be the inspired word of God by millions of Christians, and invoked - as they were invoked in Wisconsin last month - to justify disgusting and regressive bigotry against women. These verses still motivate millions who believe that women are unfit for authority, that their assigned role is to be subservient, that they should have no voice in the decisions of society.

How are we not past this? Since these verses were written, women have been heads of state, prime ministers, powerful diplomats, brave soldiers. They've excelled in law, medicine, business and literature. They've even been the heads of churches. Yet to the fundamentalists with their eyes tightly shut, none of this matters in the slightest. To their minds, morality has no relation to reality, and the success of women at governing is irrelevant to the question of whether women should govern.

Religion is to blame for preserving this unbroken thread of bigotry and sexism through the generations. In the 1500s, misogynists like John Knox wrote about why no woman should ever be permitted to hold any position of authority. In 1869, a preacher named Horace Bushnell wrote Women's Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature, arguing that women were "not created or called to govern":

What now is the general result to which we are brought by this review of the Scripture, but that women are out of place in the governing of men... there is clearly never a thought that women have a claim, on any score, to be set forward as campaigners in the state with men. The assertion of their political equality with men would have shocked any apostle, or other scripture writer, and an agitation by women, based on such equality, to secure the right of open contest with men for political office and power, would have been looked upon even as an offense against nature itself — an outrage on decency and order utterly abominable.

Such writings are doubtless why Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, "In the early days of woman-suffrage agitation, I saw that the greatest obstacle we had to overcome was the Bible. It was hurled at us on every side."

If there's any evidence at all that religious sexism is bowing to the tide of progress, it's this: Although many believers defend the unequal treatment of women, they seem embarrassed by it and are increasingly trying to argue that it's not motivated by prejudice or hatred. Consider this page from the evangelical site Got Questions?:

God has ordained that only men are to serve in positions of spiritual teaching authority in the church. This is not because men are necessarily better teachers, or because women are inferior or less intelligent (which is not the case). It is simply the way God designed the church to function. Men are to set the example in spiritual leadership — in their lives and through their words. Women are to take a less authoritative role. Women are encouraged to teach other women (Titus 2:3-5). The Bible also does not restrict women from teaching children. This does not make women less important, by any means, but rather gives them a ministry focus more in agreement with God’s plan and His gifting of them.

Got that? Men aren't better or smarter than women. It's just that God gives them different roles: men have all the leadership, the authority, and the power, and women stay home, make babies and do what men tell them. They're not unequal, just different! It's the exact same logic that was used by slaveholders to argue that Africans were ideally suited by God's design to be laborers and servants, while the superior Europeans were intended by God to rule the world.

As ridiculous as this argument is, the fact that they even feel compelled to make it shows that they're feeling the sting of embarrassment over their own beliefs. If women are just as intelligent as men, then why shouldn't they be allowed to teach men? Of course, these evangelicals close with the only answer that's available to people defending the irrational and the indefensible: "Because God said so!"

Lately, it seems that no matter how often I write about the ever-widening story of Roman Catholic bishops and the Pope protecting child molesters, new details keep bubbling up that demand another update. Well, I'm happy to oblige.

Here's what we know so far. Pope Benedict XVI, back in the late 1970s when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and archbishop of Munich, had authority over a priest, Rev. Peter Hullermann, who was known to be a child molester. At least three sets of parents had come to officials of the diocese to tell them that their sons had been sexually abused by Hullermann, including one case where he forced an 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex on him. In response, Ratzinger assigned Hullermann to undergo therapy - without, I hasten to add, reporting him to the police for prosecution. Hullermann did finish the therapy, but to no apparent effect. A subordinate of Ratzinger's, Rev. Gerhard Gruber, approved Hullermann's return to pastoral work early in 1980. Several years later, he was convicted on molestation charges stemming from yet another such incident, and additional allegations from as recently as 1998 have come to light.

None of these facts are disputed. The Vatican's defense all along has been that the future Pope had no knowledge that Hullermann had been permitted to resume his duties (although the admission that he sent a child molester to therapy and then washed his hands of the matter, all by itself, paints him in a poor light). But we now know that even this flimsy defense is false: according to a report from the New York Times, Gruber copied Ratzinger's office on the memo stating that Hullermann was being allowed to resume his duties. This memo was written just five days after Hullermann had been sent to therapy.

This horrendous scandal is custom-made for the lawyer's phrase "knew or should have known". Even if Benedict ignored the memo that was sent to him - which seems unlikely, considering his reputation as a micromanager - how can it possibly be a defense to say that he didn't care enough to follow up on what had become of a known pedophile within the clergy? Hullermann was under his jurisdiction, and Hullermann's actions are therefore, inevitably, his responsibility.

As Ratzinger rose through the ranks, he continued to be involved with pedophilia cases, and the pattern of defending the predators at the expense of the children is clearly evident. In a case from America, another priest, Rev. Lawrence Murphy, was accused of molesting as many as 200 boys at a school for the deaf. Milwaukee's archbishop wrote directly to Ratzinger, who by that time was head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, requesting that his office look into the matter and consider an ecclesiastical trial. Ratzinger ignored these letters. When a different Vatican official ordered that a trial be held, the pedophile wrote to Ratzinger requesting mercy - and the trial was canceled!

Finally, there's De Delictis Gravioribus, a letter that Ratzinger wrote to all Catholic bishops in 2001 advising them how to handle pedophilia accusations. The most important point is that bishops report such cases to the Vatican in the strictest secrecy and tell no one else about them without permission from the Pope - or as Ratzinger put it, "Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret." As before, there was no instruction to the bishops to report any credible accusations of molestation to the civil authorities. (See also.)

Contrary to the Vatican's nonspecific denials, it's clear that Ratzinger is not only personally involved in the Catholic pedophilia scandal, he's as tainted as any of the bishops who kept these cases under wraps. He, too, is guilty of participating in the Catholic hierarchy's shell game that shuffled predators from parish to parish while pressuring past victims to keep silent, ensuring that more children were raped and molested. He, too, is complicit in the church's damnable crime of trying to protect its own reputation above all else, even at the expense of countless shattered lives.

Doubtless, many faithful Catholics will refuse to accept this. The threat to their self-image, to their entire worldview, would be too great if they were to accept that the Pope himself - the heir of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ, the man they believe to be literally infallible when making pronouncements on faith or morals - was directly involved and complicit in the systematic rape of children. (Credit goes to a few rare exceptions, like the National Catholic Reporter, which demanded that the Pope take direct questions about his responsibility in the matter.)

But for the rest of us, the evidence is damning, and the conclusion is clear. The Catholic church is a den of gilded hypocrites, and it's now being led by the worst hypocrite of them all. All their pomp and pageantry can't conceal the revolting evil which they helped to perpetuate. They are guilty, guilty, guilty - and they deserve not the smallest iota of our sympathy or our support. Those who enabled and covered up these acts ought to be prosecuted and punished like the criminals they are - and those who merely defended the guilty ought to be treated as having forever forsaken whatever credibility or moral authority they ever had.

When I reported on the emerging Catholic sex-abuse scandal in Germany, it crossed my mind that the Pope is German. But I hadn't ever imagined that he'd have any personal connection to the allegations and confessions now being made there.

Well, it looks like I was wrong:

A widening child sexual abuse inquiry in Europe has landed at the doorstep of Pope Benedict XVI, as a senior church official acknowledged Friday that a German archdiocese made “serious mistakes” in handling an abuse case while the pope served as its archbishop.

...a priest accused of molesting boys was given therapy in 1980 and later allowed to resume pastoral duties, before committing further abuses and being prosecuted. Pope Benedict, who at the time headed the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, approved the priest’s transfer for therapy. A subordinate took full responsibility for allowing the priest to later resume pastoral work, the archdiocese said in a statement.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but how does it exonerate the Pope to say that he wasn't the one who allowed the accused priest to resume his duties? Shouldn't a priest accused of sexual assault be turned over to the police, not assigned to therapy? Maybe the Catholic church has grown so used to behaving as if they're above the law that this didn't even occur to them, and thought the defense that they sent a sex predator to therapy should be perfectly sufficient.

In any case, I would be very surprised if there was any concrete evidence that the Pope allowed a known sex offender to resume his clerical position. If he did play a role in that decision, the church would most likely protect him by finding a subordinate to take the blame and fall on his sword. At least one source in the Times article thinks that's just what happened here:

There was immediate skepticism that Benedict, as archbishop, would not have known of the details of the case.

The Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, who once worked at the Vatican Embassy in Washington and became an early and well-known whistle-blower on sexual abuse in the church, said the vicar general’s claim was not credible.

“Nonsense,” said Father Doyle, who has served as an expert witness in sexual abuse lawsuits. “Pope Benedict is a micromanager. He’s the old style. Anything like that would necessarily have been brought to his attention. Tell the vicar general to find a better line. What he’s trying to do, obviously, is protect the pope.”

The Catholic church would obviously like to dismiss this whole vortex of scandal as a minor distraction from their really important work (such as telling AIDS-stricken Africans that condoms don't prevent the spread of HIV). Unfortunately for them, the headlines haven't been so cooperative, and we keep getting this steady drip of news that shows just how high in the church hierarchy the rot has spread. Just think - we've now reached a point where it's completely plausible that the Pope himself was personally involved in the cover-up. (And that's not even to mention the letter he wrote telling bishops to report allegations of abuse directly to Rome and keep them under a seal of pontifical secrecy.)

Clearly, what we need are some tape recorders in the walls of the Vatican. Maybe then we'd get a clearer idea of just how intimate Benedict's involvement in this matter has been. The church has proven itself more than willing to deceive, lie, and dissemble: in the absence of such evidence, how can anything else that they say be believed?

A few weeks ago, I mentioned briefly that the Catholic church had threatened to pull out of Washington, D.C., ending the social services they provide for thousands of people, if the city council passed a law recognizing same-sex marriage. Well, the council did pass the bill, same-sex marriage is now legal in D.C. (congratulations!), and the church looks set to keep its promise, starting with the termination of their foster-care program. They've also decided to end spousal benefits for all employees, including terminating the benefits of existing employees, rather than give those benefits to same-sex partners.

Happily, as AU reports, this story has a positive ending: Since Catholic Charities has shut down their foster-care and adoption program, the service they used to provide will now be offered by other groups, including the National Center for Children and Families, that will get the public funding the Catholic group used to receive. Well done, Washington, and shame on this despicable, bigoted church that would apparently rather see children go parentless than have to provide health insurance to gay people.

On a similar note, there's this story of a 5-year-old who was expelled from a private Catholic preschool because his parents are lesbians:

In a statement sent to 9NEWS, the Archdiocese said, "Homosexual couples living together as a couple are in disaccord with Catholic teaching."

..."No person shall be admitted as a student in any Catholic school unless that person and his/her parent(s) subscribe to the school's philosophy and agree to abide by the educational policies and regulations of the school and Archdiocese," the statement said.

Editorial note: Does this school plan to expel all students whose parents are divorced? Maybe they should also send around a questionnaire asking parents if they use birth control so they can expel the children of the ones who answer yes. Of course, since something like 90% of American adults, Catholics included, use contraception, this might lead to a fairly steep dropoff in those all-important tuition checks. It seems politically safer to only target members of relatively small minorities for persecution, rather than actually try to apply their own rules consistently.

On the positive side, it seems clear that the staff who run the school were appalled by the open bigotry and hatred of their church superiors - another clear sign that American Catholics are more progressive than their benighted hierarchy:

School staff members, who asked to remain anonymous, say they are disgusted by the Archdiocese's decision.

...Staff members said they were not allowed to discuss the decision after it was made. Some of them said they were disheartened to work at a school that preaches peace and love, but also makes this decision.

A memo to these staff members: As this and the previous story make clear, Roman Catholicism does not preach love - at least not in the unconditional, universal sense we generally think of when using that word. It preaches conditional, selective love - love only for people who are willing to submit to its insane dictates and obey the orders of the pompous frauds in charge - and that's a different animal altogether.

The church's shameless bigotry against gays and lesbians is all the more outrageous considering its own continuing crimes and hypocrisy. I wrote in my last post on the Catholic church that, given the sex abuse scandals in America, Ireland and Germany, it was a statistical inevitability that more stories of child rapists among the clergy would appear in other countries as well. Now similar allegations have been made in the Netherlands. More amusingly, there's this scandal in the Vatican itself:

The Vatican was today rocked by a sex scandal reaching into Pope Benedict's household after a chorister was sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for a papal gentleman-in-waiting.

Angelo Balducci, a Gentleman of His Holiness, was caught by police on a wiretap allegedly negotiating with Thomas Chinedu Ehiem, a 29-year-old Vatican chorister, over the specific physical details of men he wanted brought to him.

And lastly, less amusingly, there's this story. The Catholic church in Ireland has racked up a $14 million bill for victim compensation after letting sexual predators in the clergy run rampant for thirty years, and the Bishop of Ferns, Denis Brennan, is asking his parishioners to pass the collection plate to cover the costs. As the Independent puts it:

In other words the Roman Catholic Church in Ferns is asking the victims of its own bitter failings to pay the price for the crime -- it is a request which beggars belief.

At this point, the church's callousness and hypocrisy has been demonstrated ad nauseam, so this no longer shocks me. The only thing that still surprises me is that a den of vipers like this one still thinks it has the authority to instruct the rest of us how we should treat our fellow human beings. Personally, I think the Pope and his hirelings ought to turn over all the remaining predators to the police, sell off the treasures of the Vatican to pay their court costs, and spend a few decades in sackcloth and ashes before they should even think of venturing an opinion on moral topics again.

Postscript: Although it's not a sex scandal, there was one more story that came out just after I wrote this that I couldn't omit: the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has banned voluntary end-of-life measures in the more than 600 Catholic hospitals and nursing homes around the country. In other words, Catholic institutions will no longer honor patients' living wills stating that they don't wish to be kept alive by feeding tubes if they're irreversibly comatose or terminally ill.

Although the law protects patients from being subjected to any medical treatment against their will, it's easy to see how this decision could be used by Catholic hospital administrators to coerce grief-stricken families and patients who may not be capable of expressing their desires. Even in the best case, it will almost certainly lead to more pointless suffering as patients who don't want to be kept artificially alive try to find another hospital to transfer to that will respect their wishes. We need to publicize the evil and tyrannical pretensions of the bishops, and I suggest this slogan: "If you want to have a feeding tube forcibly crammed down your throat or run through a hole cut into your stomach so you can be kept alive to suffer, then make sure you go to a Catholic hospital!"